When the local science museum looks to hire performers, David Nett believes he's the perfect man for the job.
David Nett has spent over 20 years in Los Angeles writing, producing, and acting in TV, film, and theater. Currently, he’s the writer for Geek & Sundry’s "Starter Kit,” the VP of Entertainment Development for ArcMedia, co-owner of Hero’s Journey Fitness with his wife, Christy, and the Dungeon Master for two ongoing Dungeons & Dragons campaigns, one that he’s been running since 1987. He wants to thank his parents, who did not utter a single angry word (to his face) when he left his academic scholarships behind to study acting.
This story originally aired on May 31, 2019 in an episode titled “Plan B.”
Story Transcript
I’m sitting in the theater at the Science Museum of Minnesota in downtown St. Paul. There are nine of us in the auditorium, one on stage, eight in the audience. Those of us in the audience, five of us are applauding politely and three of us are sitting at a table near the stage writing. Those three work for the museum. They're the directors of the Science Live Program.
The other six of us are here auditioning for what 23-year-old David believes is the perfect job. The position in the Science Live performance team giving sketches and experiments throughout the museum for the kingly salary of $18,000 a year. Think of that. 18,000 dollars.
We’re sitting in the auditorium watching each other audition. The woman on stage has just finished. She's about my age and she taught us a children’s song. It was fine. It had nothing to do with science. But she's smiling and we’re applauding and I’m feeling a little bit bad because I know her smile is about to fade because I’m up next and I’m about to bring the fucking house down.
Someone calls my name. I stand. I straighten my lab coat. That’s right. I've got a real-life lab coat. I grab my box full of flasks and pipettes and I stride confidently toward that stage.
Now, why am I so confident in this moment? Well, it’s not just the stupid confidence of a middle-class, college-educated, 23-year-old white man. Not just that. You see, I know something that these five poor saps don’t know. Not only am I an actor but, unlike the rest of them, I am almost a scientist. See, my dad is a scientist. He's a chemist. My brother is also a chemist, at least by training, and though my degree is in acting, when I started college I was pretty convinced I was going to be the next Richard Feynman.
If you don’t know Feynman, he's a very famous physicist. He's a Nobel Prize winner, among the youngest members of the Manhattan Project, a distinguished professor. He was also a great writer. He was great at taking in really complex scientific ideas and distilling them down to layman’s terms in a series of really wonderful books, some of them very funny. He's also a brilliant performer. His lectures attracted huge crowds of scientists and non-scientists and everybody always hung on his every word. I wanted to be him very badly.
So I got scholarships at the local university for both Physics and English, and I decided to take some theater classes as well so I could cover all of the bases and I was on my way. However, as my math and science classes got more difficult, I discovered that I might not be as smart as I thought I was. By my third year of school, I was struggling with my high-end science classes and maintaining the GPA that my scholarship required was not as effortless as it had been when I was young. I slowly began to realize that I may not in fact be a genius.
This was a great blow. Who could have known that graduating second in a class of 42 in a tiny town of 900 people in the North Dakota prairie might not make you an actual genius? A lot of people probably, some of them geniuses but, unfortunately, not me.
Fortunately, I had a backup plan. My first couple of years of school I had a developed a great love for the theater so my backup plan was this. I was going to leave behind my three years of English and Physics education, ditch my scholarships, change schools, take out loans, cram a BFA in Acting into two years and become a famous actor. It was the kind of plan whose idiotic simplicity could have only come from a 20-year-old brain.
My parents, with their loving support, and my girlfriend who just, by coincidence, happened to be an acting student at the new school, agreed that it was a great plan and so I was on my way.
So here I was three years later, one year shy of a BA in English, one semester shy of a BA in Physics, one disputed transfer class short of a BFA in Acting, three professional plays and a local commercial under my belt. I was ready for this.
As I mounted that stage, my gear in hand, I was supremely confident that I was easily the most qualified person in this room, perhaps in the entire Greater Minneapolis, St. Paul area to be part of the Minnesota Science Museum Science Live Program. I begin to unload my gear and set up my experiments. I took my time. Both science and the theater reward patience.
I set up my table. I place three large Erlenmeyer flasks full of colored liquid side by side on the table. I produced three pipettes of descending diameter and placed them beside each flask, one, two, three, just so. And I began my demonstration of the capillary effect.
It was the perfect science demonstration. It was colorful, it was fun, it was simple to learn and to teach. It was so simple, in fact, that I had barely had to rehearse at all. I started talking about the basics: surface tension, cohesion versus adhesion, and suddenly I realized that this is taking a lot longer than I thought that it was going to. I only had five minutes for the entire demonstration and I had no idea how much time I had spent on this introduction.
So, okay, we’ll pivot to the flasks. We point out the three flasks. Good. They look cool. Everybody seems impressed. I talk about the pipettes a little bit. Then I realized that while I had practiced inserting the pipettes into each flask and watching the liquid rise to different levels, I hadn’t actually planned anything to say while I was doing this.
It’s okay. I'll roll with that. Those Improv classes that I hated because they were a waste of time when I could have been studying the Bard or the great American playwrights will finally come in handy for once.
Deep breath. Yes, and we've got this.
And I did have it. I finish the demonstration. It was pretty great. I got a little chuckle at the end, which I have no idea what I said to deserve it because I hadn’t actually planned an ending. Then I finished up by wrapping it all together by saying, “Ladies and gentlemen, that is the capillary effect in action.”
Light applause from the audience. It was okay. I hadn’t really expected more. They were my competition after all and I had just dropped this science bomb on them. So I gather my things and I leave the stage.
The next person that comes up on stage is an actor about ten years older than me. I'd seen him in a couple of plays around town. He was a good actor. Then he gets to the stage and he tells us he's going to tell a story but that he needs our help. So he assigns us each a word that when he stomps or claps or points or whatever we’re supposed to shout out that word. It’s super corny. I roll my eyes a whole bunch.
And he starts to tell his story. It’s about bunnies. Not about science in any way just like the first person, but I play along. When he points to me I shout my word just loud enough to be polite. But, to my surprise, my competition in the audience are really getting into it. They're yelling out their word, they’re laughing at his story. Even the panel up front seems to be really engaged. He brings this story to this raucous conclusion and everyone hollers and claps and shouts and I was just looking around dumbfounded.
He leaves the stage. The next guy that gets up there he teaches us a dance and he's super broad. He's like a clown. I can’t understand what’s happening but my competition is like up and dancing in the aisles and laughing and playing along. I’m looking around at all of them just completely unsure about what’s going on in this room.
He leaves the stage and the third person after me goes up and it’s a woman I recognize from the children’s theater in town. It’s more interaction and it’s more laughter and it’s more applause from the audience but not a single drop of science. Like what are you people doing? Don’t you know this job is about science?
By the time the last person takes the stage I've calmed myself. Of course this is what these people are doing. They're actors. They're overcompensating because they don’t know science. I do. This is still my job for the taking.
When we’re all finished, the staff take the stage and the woman who’s in charge she thanks us for coming out on a weekday and she says, “This was so much fun. You were all so great. We had so much fun. And that’s the most important thing in this job.”
Then she looks directly at me and she says, “Oh, and we learned a little bit too.”
It was in that moment that I realized I had been completely outmatched. I had misunderstood the assignment completely. It didn’t matter how high my test scores were or what I had studied in school or how many times I had read Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! My job had been to come into this room and to delight the small audience by teaching them something, anything. If I'd gotten the job, the museum would have provided the science. I had come and brought to this audition a brand new lab coat and a five-minute, disjointed, middle-school science lecture. The others had brought joy.
I didn’t get the job. And I wish I could tell you that it was the last time I was overconfident for audition that I was woefully unprepared for but it wasn’t. It took me a long time to learn how to prepare to bring joy into that room. I still often fail, but I always try.
Interestingly, when I was doing research on the Science Museum of Minnesota to make sure that I got the names and things right for this story, I learned that the current director of the Science Live Program is actually an old college friend of mine. I couldn’t help thinking that if I reached out to her I might be able to get an audition. After more than 20 years, that sweet, $18,000-a-year perfect job might finally be mine, because I know what to do this time. I know to bring joy. Thank you.